ARAS innovator already provides the “In Basket”, where you can see and participate to projects and changes, but adding slack into the picture can become a wonderful efficiency booster !

Slack is adding another dimension to ARAS, it allows multiple people to see live what happens to some specific objects into live feed. Allowing better re-activity and efficiency instead of viewing a pile of mails looking all the same where usually you have specific filters to “move” (if not re-move) them out of sight from your inbox.

Why should I publish something to multiple people if ARAS already determines who is the best to do something ?

That’s a really good question that usually is raised by “doers”, people who actually do things. Where some of those tasks might interest other people, like managers or other team member working on similar topics. So publishing in Slack some events can leverage the capability of a “Team” to react as a “Team” instead of individuals reacting differently without crossing their informations.

At Minerva, we use Slack during our development phases to keep track of what happens to our Continuous Integration and also having at the same place (#ProjectChannel), the bug raised by our customers. It allows us to react live and reduce the lead time for fixing, usually to “immediate”. It has improved our capacity of fixing bugs in an efficient way as the person who knows the bug will manifest himself and take the ticket for him. Avoiding meetings to dispatch little, trivial things when a developer is still developing on the same feature.

So how to plug Slack into ARAS ?

Just need a slack webhook, from your slack Channel just click to the tools / Add an app or Integration.

Select Build you own on the top right of the website and then, “Something just for my team”

When you will have requested a webHook, you will have a URL.

https://hooks.slack.com/services/HASH1/HASH2/HASH3

This URL is the entry point for sending information into slack, you can use this URL from anywhere actually, the combination of HASH is unique and is linked to your Slack domain.

In ARAS, you need to create a Method or add the following content to any of your method that might be place into a PRE or a POST into LifeCycle of Workflow.

You need to add this bit of Code wherever you need to send a notification. This example is valid to be plugged on a Part LifeCycle transition, cause I’m returning a link pointing to a Part itemType, but you can enhance (Documentation here) the content you send in Slack with picture, document, etc.